It will probably not come as a surprise to many of us that a new report has found 7.23am to be the most stressful time of the day for many of us. It's a time of the day in many houses which involves a lot of rushing around, high level negotiations with children and trying to find your keys.
But if we're all feeling such high levels of stress first thing in the morning, how can we possibly cope for the rest of the day? Dr Jolanta Burke from the RCSI joined the Drivetime team on RTÉ Radio 1 to discuss how we deal with this blast of early morning stress. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full above).
"It's very, very common that we have higher levels of cortisol, which is the stress hormone, around the time we wake up", says Burke. "About one hour before we wake up, our cortisol levels start rising. For the rest of the day, they try to lower themselves until we go to sleep and wake up again and the same thing happens. Levels go up and down throughout the day and definitely the daily hassles you've just mentioned make a huge difference to this."
Burke says the more daily hassles we have, the more stressful we are. "Those daily hassles are more detrimental to our health then maybe even the big traumas that we experience. When big traumas happen, we often get support from others. We might even give ourselves a pat on our back for dealing well with some adversities. But when a whole load of small, bad things happen - like, for example, those daily hassles - we tend not to give ourselves a break. We tend to blame ourselves for not feeling well with what we're experiencing and there is nobody with lasagne on the doorstep helping us through it."
So what's the best way to deal with this? "The easiest thing to do is to set up a routine and try and manage this routine quite well. If you know that maybe getting up at specific time is not good for you, try and wake up a little bit earlier. Perhaps tweak your routine if needs be and ensure there are less unpredictable events during the morning time."
Drivetime presenter Sarah McInerney gave an example of the legendary broadcaster Larry Gogan. "Larry was undertaking some tests and asked to wear a heart monitor. When the cardiologist was reviewing the data, they asked him 'what are you doing at this particular time of day?' Larry asked 'why are you interested?' and the doctor said because this is when you're at your calmest and experiencing zero stress. It turned out that was the time when Larry was live on air".
"I think that it just shows how the great impact work can have on you. If you are in the right place, if you have the right attitude towards what you're doing, if you are flourishing be it at work or in generally in your daily life, you don't experience as much stress.
"The truth is that stress is not bad for us. Stress is actually helping us keep going. If our stress level didn't go very high up in the morning, we wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the first place. We wouldn't be able to concentrate on work and do the things that we that we love doing throughout the day."
